Zecco Trading: Financial Services Site Evaluation

Zecco Trading:

Financial Services Site Evaluation and Benchmark

The web has created a unique opportunity for traders to cost-effectively manage their portfolios online. A source of value for these services lies in the ease with which users can use the portal. Assessing current usage and benchmarking performance of site enhancements enable development teams to create product solutions that cater to customer needs.

Background

Zecco is an online brokerage site for stock, options, and forex traders that offers low-cost stock and options trades.

To better meet the needs of its users, Zecco set out to update its portal and upcoming trading platform. In doing so, Zecco needed to assess the features of its current offering and identify new opportunities to enhance the value of its product for customers. Specifically, the team sought to evaluate the current user experience on its site to understand user behavior and identify the most important site features and attributes, benchmark the site’s performance overtime to track the efficacy of future enhancements, and determine new services / content that would be helpful for site visitors.

Objectives

Evaluate overall user experience on the Zecco Trading site

Benchmark current site performance for comparison against new site experience

Determine new content that would enhance the user experience

Solution

In order to meet these objectives, eVOC Insights developed a tailored methodology and conducted a comprehensive series of lab-based and web-based evaluations to understand the current profile of visitors, overall ease of use and feature satisfaction, and back-end performance and execution of the site experience across key tasks.

eVOC benchmarked performance across three phases of the website development, as well as lab-based qualitative usability testing to evaluate the effectiveness of the new prototype designs.

Key Findings

The developments over the three phases resulted in:

87% improvement in ease of finding a quote from 39% in 2009 to 73% in 2010

86% increase in ease of making a stock trade from 36% in 3009 to 67% in 2010